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Owens (2017) Clean version of Millennium resubmission.pdf (352.39 kB)

Racism in the theory canon: Hannah Arendt and ‘the one great crime in which America was never involved'

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 05:07 authored by Patricia Owens
Hannah Arendt’s monumental study The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, is a founding text in postcolonial studies, locating the seeds of European fascism in the racism of imperial expansion. However, Arendt also harboured deep racial prejudices, especially when writing about people of African descent, which affected core themes in her political thought. The existing secondary literature has diagnosed but not adequately explained Arendt’s failures in this regard. This article shows that Arendt’s anti-black racism is rooted in her consistent refusal to analyse the colonial and imperial origins of racial conflict in the United States given the unique role of the American republic in her vision for a new post-totalitarian politics. In making this argument, the article also contributes to the vexed question of how international theorists should approach important ‘canonical’ thinkers whose writings have been exposed as racist, including methodological strategies for approaching such a body of work, and engages in a form of self-critique for marginalising this problem in earlier writing on Arendt.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Millennium

ISSN

0305-8298

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Issue

3

Volume

45

Page range

403-424

Department affiliated with

  • International Relations Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Centre for Advanced International Theory Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-02-09

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2017-04-03

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-02-09

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